Posts Tagged: Tor

Guns of the Dawn is set in a fantasy world: there are wizards, there are sentient non-human races, the names of the nations are all fictitious. At the same time, Guns is far more of an ‘echo history’ than Shadows of the Apt was 1. Specifically, the world and time of Emily Marshwic and her peers is a distorted mirror of Regency England, the start of the 19th century and the Napoleonic war. There are other strands in there – something of the English Civil War, something of the American War of Independence (for it is a war story) – but the Regency thread is by far the strongest. Read More »

The release of Brandon Sanderson’s Words of Radiance looms on the horizon like a highstorm. Tor continues to drum up excitement for a novel that is sure to be one of the biggest fantasy releases of the year, and heir apparent to Robert Jordan’s completed Wheel of Time series (’cause, something has to fill that spot on Tor’s release schedule, right?), with a generous dose of early-release chapters.

(Please note: chapter seven has not been released early, so don’t skip it when you read the final book!)

And a little sneak peek (with, I suppose, minor spoilers for those of you sensitive to those things. In which case, why have you read so far through this post?)

Shallan sat again on her box on the ship’s deck, though she now wore a hat on her head, a coat over her dress, and a glove on her freehand—her safehand was, of course, pinned inside its sleeve.

The chill out here on the open ocean was something unreal. The captain said that far to the south, the ocean itself actually froze. That sounded incredible; she’d like to see it. She’d occasionally seen snow and ice in Jah Keved, during the odd winter. But an entire ocean of it? Amazing.

She wrote with gloved fingers as she observed the spren she’d named Pattern. At the moment, he had lifted himself up off the surface of the deck, forming a ball of swirling blackness—infinite lines that twisted in ways she could never have captured on the flat page. Instead, she wrote descriptions supplemented with sketches.

“Food…” Pattern said. The sound had a buzzing quality and he vibrated when he spoke.

“Yes,” Shallan said. “We eat it.” She selected a small limafruit from the bowl beside her and placed it in her mouth, then chewed and swallowed.

“Eat,” Pattern said. “You… make it… into you.”

“Yes! Exactly.”

You might be concerned that Tor is releasing too much of Words of Radiance before the book even hits store shelves. Worry not. By my calculations, the currently released excerpts only cover 0.000839% of the 17,000 page manuscript for Words of Radiance. That’s but a feather atop a mountain.

In a post-Wheel of Time world, Brandon Sanderson is king. Hot off the heels of A Memory of Light, the final volume of Robert Jordan’s long-running series, Tor turned to Sanderson to fill the huge, gaping void left behind. Jordan’s are big shoes to fill, but Sanderson already proved his gumption, and cemented his place as Tor’s successor to Jordan, by completing the Wheel of Time to much critical success after Jordan’s passing in 2007. Words of Radiance the second volume in Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archives is set for release on March 4th, 2014, and promises to be one of the biggest (literally, critically and commercially) fantasy releases of the year.

Tor.com reveals what Stormlight fans have to look forward to with the upcoming sequel to The Way of Kings:

In The Way of Kings, we were introduced to the remarkable world of Roshar, a land both alien and magical. Roshar is shared by humans and the enigmatic Parshendi, who have been at war with each other for five years. The war has revealed the worst of humanity to Dalinar Kholin, a powerful general, and Kaladin Stormblessed, a troubled slave. But there is more at stake in this conflict than the fate of the peoples involved. As Jasnah Kholin and her ward Shallan Davar discover, their entire world is rushing towards a cataclysm, one that only a long-lost order called the Knights Radiant could possibly prepare them for.

In Words of Radiance these stories will intertwine and develop in thrilling and unexpected directions. The war with the Parshendi will move into a new, dangerous phase, as Dalinar leads the human armies deep into the heart of the Shattered Plains in a bold attempt to finally end it. Shallan is set on finding the legendary and perhaps mythical city of Urithiru, which Jasnah believes holds a secret vital to mankind’s survival on Roshar. Kaladin struggles to wear the mantle of the Windrunners as his old demons resurface. And the threat of the Voidbringers’ return hangs over them all.

Additionally, Tor.com has published the prologue and first two chapters of Words of Radiance for eager fans to read, read again, devour, and analyze. March 4th can’t come soon enough, can it?

Peter Watts is the Hugo-winning Canadian author of Blindsight, described by The Globe and Mail as, “a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive,” which is a reputation he has lived up to among fans of hard science fiction. Through their Spring/Summer catalog, Tor has revealed details about Echopraxia, his first novel since 2006.

Prepare for a different kind of singularity in this follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight.

It’s the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it’s all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself.

Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat’s-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he’s turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out.

Now he’s trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn’t yet found the man she’s sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call “The Angels of the Asteroids.”

Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself.

Before becoming a writer, Watts acquired a PhD in Zoology and Resource Ecology from the University of British Columbia, which makes me even more curious to see that Echopraxia appears to deal with the merging of biology and technology. Watts is known as one of the best authors at weaving intelligent scientific exploration and debate into the narratives of his story, and everything about the synopsis for Echopraxia tugs at my interests. Peter Watts can be trusted with big ideas, and Echopraxia appears to be full of them.

Watts’ most famous novel, Blindsight had, erm… less than inspiring cover art, so it’s nice to see Tor giving him the attention that a writer of his calibre deserves. There’s an obvious similarity to covers for James S.A. Corey’s enormously popular Expanse trilogy, but the clean typography separates the two and also brings to mind Tor’s equally impressive work on the John Harris covers for John C. Wright’s Count to the Eschaton Sequence. I’m not sure how anyone could pass this book in a bookstore and not pick it up.

I’m really grateful for Aidan’s invitation to come and guest blog here at A Dribble of Ink. When he approached me, we talked about a post on religion in fantasy, which is a rather broad topic – and one that’s of great interest to me. But as I’ve thought about it more and more, the topic has narrowed itself down to my own personal exploration of religion through the mechanism of writing. Anyone even the slightest bit familiar with my work will see that religion shows up in one form or another across my body of work, probably even more so than my other favorite exploration: apocalypse. Frequently, the two of them are hand in hand.

These days, I’m mostly known as the author of the series The Psalms of Isaak (hey, look at the religious language right there in the title!) but long before I wrote novels, I was slogging it out in the world of short stories with something in the vicinity of twenty stories published before my first novel found a home. And while one important aspect of my series is an exploration of the role of religion in human life and how it can be used as a weapon or tool, my short stories are wide-open playground jam-packed with far more opportunities to explore many of the “what-if’s” around the subject. Read More »